JORDAN: Homeless folks out there, they need a job; single mothers, single fathers, people trying to make it on their own—I will open those seats for people that need it before I let someone entitled sit in here and act like that. We’re not gonna argue about it, because I’m telling you now what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

FRED: Yes, there’s people that come here for a beauty pageant. But nobody in here should be making less than $15 or $16 an hour.

EMILY: [unable to help herself] Do most people here make $15 or $16 an hour?

FRED: If you’re willing to work hard, have a good attitude and great attendance? Yes. Let’s say you work 160 hours a month. If you make a $440 bonus for the month, you just cut yourself two more dollars an hour. So now we’re at $13, give or take, and with your NRS—

STEVE: NRS is “net rep stat”—that’s where if the caller takes the thirty seconds to do that automatic survey after. Y’all probably already heard about promoters, neutrals, and detractors? When you start getting those promoters, depending on your scores, you get extra money. If you do your job well, you take care of customers, you can make between $750 and $800 extra every month—before sales.

After orientation, Kimberly gives us another bad omen—several sets of randomly generated log-ins and passwords to memorize. None are the same; few are even related. We’re not allowed to write them down in any way—paper, pens, and cell phones are forbidden anywhere but the break room—and they’re not easy.* Kimberly will waste a lot of time over the next five weeks reading out half the class’s log-ins and passwords for various systems when we need to use them. It’s a good three weeks before I have mine completely down. I recognize the password situation, like highly scrutinized bathroom breaks, as a dead canary in a coal mine.

[...]

There’s so many passwords because Convergys’s computer system is actually about eight separate systems kludged together like Frankenstein’s monster. Each system has its own log-in, password, and set of uses and rules, and they don’t play particularly well together.

Kimberly’s an excellent teacher and does her best to keep the weeks of memorization interesting, but the systems don’t make it easy on her. Since Convergys is nominally paperless, our entire curriculum is online. But the computers are ancient, pages we need are frequently 404’d, and often half the passwords won’t work. Everything feels really bootleg compared to the sleek efficiency of Amazon.

For example, we split into small groups one day to make and present posters on a given topic. My group is assigned the problem of what to do if someone calls in to cancel service for a loved one who’s died. CSP specifically notes that this is one of the few situations where reps are not required to make a sales offer, so I write DO NOT TRY TO SELL THEM ANYTHING at the top of the posterboard in big, bold letters. Then, because the fruit-scented markers take me straight back to elementary school, I surround the words with green stars and yellow lightning bolts for extra emphasis.

When Kimberly comes around to check on our progress, she frowns, picks up a marker, and crosses out my NOT. “I know it sounds weird, but you always make an offer on every call, regardless of why the person is calling,” she says. Protesting, we pull up CSP and show her. “Oh, you’re absolutely right. I do apologize,” Kimberly says in that odd cadence, shrugging. She rewrites NOT above the one she crossed out. “They must have just changed the CSP—it was not like that the last class I had.” I try not to imagine the situation that prompted the rule change.

[...] we’ve been told that management screens calls randomly and that they listen to every call that trips an alarm suggesting customer dissatisfaction.

They’re very vague about what gets a call flagged, which makes me suspect this “alarm” is as bullshit as SDF8’s “high-tech security system.” There’s some low-hanging quantifiables, I guess—if the rep hangs up before the customer, which isn’t allowed. If the customer gives negative feedback. If the customer calls back the next week. If the rep doesn’t have all eight windows up and loaded. If the customer yells at you. If you don’t say some specific keywords you’re supposed to use.

I’m initially skeptical of rumors that some software scans every call for proper (or improper) verbiage and flags calls in which a customer swears or sounds irritated. As someone who transcribes a lot of interviews, I’ve followed the progress of speech-recognition technology pretty closely: last time I checked, the day I could trust a computer to do my transcription for me was still at least a decade away.

Q: Your customer-service representatives handle roughly sixty calls in an eight-hour shift, with a half-hour lunch and two fifteen-minute breaks. By the end of the day, a problematic number of them are so exhausted by these interactions that their ability to focus, read basic conversational cues, and maintain a peppy demeanor is negatively affected. Do you:

A. Increase staffing so you can scale back the number of calls each rep takes per shift—clearly, workers are at their cognitive limits

B. Allow workers to take a few minutes to decompress after difficult calls

C. Increase the number or duration of breaks

D. Decrease the number of objectives workers have for each call so they aren’t as mentally and emotionally taxing

E. Install a program that badgers workers with corrective pop-ups telling them that they sound tired

Seriously—what kind of fucking sociopath goes with E?

But it doesn’t actually matter whether Convergys uses this kind of software. As with SDF8’s security theater, what’s important is that a lot of people believe it’s being used and fear it.*

“Seriously, just be glad they have wipes now!” says Kaitlyn when I poke fun at the eight wipes she uses every single morning. “It’s so much better than before.”

How so?

“It was really nasty the first time I worked here,” which was a couple of years ago under the old managment, she says. “They didn’t clean the desks, and they didn’t have any of those wipes. You could bring hand sanitizer, and some people brought Lysol wipes even though you weren’t supposed to. We were pretty much all constantly sick, though. I caught MRSA pretty bad, but it wasn’t—”

“Wait, what?” I almost shriek. Half the room looks over, curious.

“Huh?” Kaitlyn looks confused.

My brain has stalled out. “What? Did you just say you got fucking MRSA?” As in the “superbug” that doesn’t respond to most antibiotics? Like Ebola, it’s something I’d read about, but never expected to encounter in real life.

[...]

“Well, I tried to get help with the bills from them, because I know that I got it from here,” she says, grimacing. But at the time, she hadn’t hit the three-month mark at Convergys yet. “So I was uninsured and paying everything out of pocket. My husband and I had saved up for the baby, so we were prepared for my C-section and maybe a little bit extra, but not something like this.
“So I went back and explained to them what happened, but they just refused.” Kaitlyn sighs. “They said they were sorry, but that was that unless I had cold, hard proof of everything.”

“Holy shit, that’s awful!” I say. “Did you quit?”

“I stayed for a while—because, you know, bills—but I kept Lysol wipes in my bag whether they liked it or not. They didn’t want me to use them, so I’d have to wipe everything down super fast and dry it and shove everything back in my pocket,” says Kaitlyn. Damn—I knew they were serious about the no-paper policy, but extending the ban to Lysol wipes? I try to think of it from Taylor’s mistrustful point of view—I guess you could write someone’s credit-card information on a Lysol wipe?

[...] What are customers going to do—switch providers? They almost certainly signed a multiyear contract, and why go through the huge annoyance of switching to a new company and a new phone number when the customer service there will inevitably be just as bad? Hell, there’s a decent chance they’ll just end up talking to a rep from a different Convergys site.

And what are the reps going to do—quit? They know all too well that it’s just as stressful at Chick-fil-A.

“The new guy put cameras legit everywhere. We called him Big Brother for the longest, ’cause he’s always watching. He can even access it from his phone, so he can watch us, like, while he’s at home in bed—and if he sees something he doesn’t like, he’ll rush in from forty minutes away to say, ‘I seen you do this, and you better not do it again!’”

“Holy shit!” I say, curious. “Like, what sort of stuff?”

“Like…” Kolbi thinks, then laughs. “Oh, I got a good one—we weren’t allowed to use cups. We can give customers free waters of any size cup, but us, ourselves, we weren’t allowed to use cups—not even for water, not for anything. We had to bring our own cups. So if he’d see someone with a cup, he’ll come, and he’ll get you for it. He fired a person over that.”

By suspending the auto parts to be worked on from a chain that moved the parts down a line of stationary workers, there was no need for the constant individual managerial oversight of Taylorism. It was visually obvious when someone wasn’t keeping up, because unfinished pieces started building up at his station. It was impossible to hide any deviation from the pace of work. And since management controlled the speed of the chain, workers lost any remaining control they had over that pace.

Productivity skyrocketed. In seven months, the time it took to produce a Model T fell from twelve and a half hours to an astonishing ninety-three minutes. That year, Ford made more Model Ts than all its competitors put together. By its high point, in 1925, the Crystal Palace churned out nine thousand Model Ts a day.

But workers hated it there.

One former Highland Park worker described his time there as “a form of hell on earth that turned human beings into driven robots.” Another: “[Ford] attempts to standardize the machines, and so he does with labor.” The wife of another worker was so concerned she actually wrote Ford a letter: “The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God! Mr. Ford. My husband has come home & thrown himself down & won’t eat his supper—so done out! Can’t it be remedied?”

Workers hated the assembly line for more than just the physical demands, though. It’s tough to take pride in a job that “a child of three” might do. And tasks were broken down so minutely that, as Ford wrote, “the man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.” Workmen found tightening the same kind of nut a thousand times a day brutally boring.

But Ford didn’t take their complaints very seriously. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he appeared to believe that workers didn’t actually mind jobs that were monotonous, unrewarding, and physically exhausting. He wouldn’t want that sort of thing himself, of course, but he saw himself as practically a different species than the oxlike laborers on his lines:

Repetitive labour—the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way—is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.

“Toggling” means briefly logging out of your phone, then logging back in again. There’s no Pause button—we have as much power over our next call coming in as a Ford worker would have over the next auto part rolling down the assembly line. If you need to do something between calls that will take more than thirty seconds—finish up something complicated from the previous call, use the bathroom, yoga-breathe yourself back from the brink of tears—you have to completely log out. This is extremely forbidden, but I still do it a lot. I don’t really have any other option—I just can’t keep up with the pace yet, no matter how hard I try.

Toggling, Vicki says, is time theft. She glares around the room fiercely. I’m relieved I’m not the only one who looks guilty.

“It is considered stealing from the company,” Vicki says. She has that weird Convergys accent, too, layered over a thicker Carolina one. “That is why you see a clipboard beside me—at the end of the day, I go through the Melody reports, and I correct ’em.”

I get to leave, I think as I drive past the Baymont Suites. I get to leave, I think, driving past the Walmart, YMCA, and Barnes & Noble. I get to leave, I think, driving past the Chick-fil-A, Hickory Furniture Mart, and all the abandoned factories along the interstate. They all shrink to nothing in my rearview mirror, and the only thing I can think is I get to leave.